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It seems off and on, I routinely have one downvote show up on every thing, including totally benign “hahah cute cat” type comments, or comments that are otherwise well received.
It started happening after I criticized Israel for genocide. (Specifically around the time that there was that giant missile barrage right at the start of the Israeli response.)
Checking my recent comments it seems to be off at the moment.
I used the tool and it looks like I have a downvoting stalker that dutifully downvotes my posts and comments. Aww... that's so cute!
Noticed this a while back. The anti Israel sentiment could be it. We know Israeli parasites are scraping the internet to doxx people so it would make sense they are tagging people they IDes for some data gathering purposes
They seem pro-palestine, or at least anti-genocide. I think they just don't like me. Who knows? Still flattered.
Part of me has wanted this for a long time. The other part of me wants to forget I now know about it.
At least the handful I checked seem to be random, so likely accidental, but I can see this driving me crazy.
Users with one downvote on every recent comment/post is usually some other user raging and being incapable of accepting other people's opinions.
Pretty sure it's just users that disagree going and downvoting latest comments. At least for me, there was a MAGAt that didn't like anti-trump stuff and gave me 1 downvote on everything I posted from that single comment, on backwards in my history for about a week or so.
I thought it was a bot at first, but then I realized it started right after my comment replying to him correcting him on his conspiracy theory stupidity cult nonsense. Everything posted after that comment received no downvotes.
When something like this happens to me I get so happy. Way to absolutely waste your time downvoting you mullet.
I think we have a few knuckleheads who think it improves the algorithm and don't realize that Lemmy doesn't work that way.
i.e. meh, not my type of post. I don't care about trains. Downvote! Similar idea with comments thinking somehow it will show them better comments.
I sooner attribute this to ignorance rather than malice.
Votes mean less on Lemmy than they did on Reddit. So we can sweat it less what people do with them. Not a big deal.
I remember a long time ago noticing, while sorting by new, that posts in some communities had downvotes within seconds of being posted, so yes I think there are bots.
The votes are public but inaccessible in UI. You can check them.
I made this tool to check votes on a comment/post, and I am working on an option to see all votes a user has cast
Now, this is interesting. As far as I know, all of the public threadiverse softwares specifically hide this info (especially downvotes), while acknowledging that the way ActivityPub works, the information is public anyway and you're really just making it slightly less accessible. An open service like this essentially removes all of the supposed barriers (e.g. "Most users don't know how to set up their own instance in order to see downvotes.") which are claimed to keep this info private.
What kind of effect does knowing exactly which people downvoted you have on a platform? Is there a chilling effect on downvotes, is there revenge downvoting? I guess we'll find out. It's less easy to see the upsides of knowing this info, beyond being able to confirm whether or not you're being stalked by persistent downvoters.
@lena@gregtech.eu Did you have any particular thoughts around the ethics of this tool when you decided to make and share it? Not trying to call you out in any way, just interested to hear how you feel about it. Ultimately, if it wasn't you it would be somebody else, so the direct impact is probably negligible.
Thanks for the question, I believe the illusion of privacy is worse than the lack of privacy. Currently, non-technical users or newbies think that their votes are private, which they are definitely not. Someone could spin up an instance and see the votes, which users cast without thinking about how private they really are.
I will also write a blog post about this tool and its ethics.
Nice, I'll look forward to reading that, thanks!
Your point re: the illusion of privacy makes sense. Most Lemmy/other threadiverse users are probably used to platforms where that data is not public and I don't think any of the softwares really highlight that it's different here. It's easy to get a false impression of privacy.
Its a bit easier than just pasting the link into friendica.
What kind of effect does knowing exactly which people downvoted you have on a platform? Is there a chilling effect on downvotes, is there revenge downvoting? I guess we'll find out.
It's not like we haven't had public downvoting in the fediverse yet. We already found out in the past.
Kbin had public downvotes and the main effect was that people put more thought into their downvotes. While I assume it wasn't without abuse, I've never seen it brought up as an active problem, just something that could theoretically happen.
Thanks, this is a really handy tool. Kniwing the information was being withheld 'just because' was really rankling me. Now, could you just add a quick feature to read their minds and tell me why they down voted me? ;)
Now, could you just add a quick feature to read their minds and tell me why they down voted me? ;)
AI hallucinations as a feature :3
Failed to fetch votes, classic
Huh, may I see the URL you used? And did you select the proper option (post/comment)?
I selected your comment from my instance
I kinda have no idea why this doesn't work @_@. The canonical URL does work though.
Nice! Any chance you could have it filter by community? Would be useful as a mod to see who's downvoting a lot in a comm
I will try, this is my first serious project so uhh no guarantees :P
Achievement unlocked! You've gained your first unreasonably demanding user!
Not unreasonable at all, I just suck at software development :3
The unreasonable part comes later 😜
It's happened to me before. It was a real account, too (i can't remember the username but it was some ML account). I would've banned/reported them but i deleted my old account anyway in favor of this one.
edit: Found them, it was moe93@lemmy.ml. I guess they're a real account, not too active but was still ban-worthy. Oh well, it was some time ago so no point in doing anything abt it lol.
I've had it happen with .world accounts. People are extremely petty and wear it as a badge of honor. It's pretty pathetic when they're the ones constantly pointing out the pettiness of world-stage players.
Are you seeing users with most of their comments at +/-0, or do you mean you see -1 on all their posts? I'm pretty sure there is a setting to have your own comments not automatically be upvoted by yourself. The users you have seen might just have had that turned on? Resulting in 0 for all their comments unless someone else upvotes it.
Just fyi, some Lemmy clients (e.g. Thunder, probably others) show the upvotes and downvotes distinctly, so you can easily see something like ‘2 1’ which corresponds to ‘upvotes downvotes’. It’s makes it easier to see if there are downvotes versus removed upvotes.
And in Voyager you can enable between seeing them separately or as one number.
Anyone wondering its under appearance, scroll down, display votes and there are 3 options separate, total or to hide
I know that Reddit does (at least it did back when I still used it) but I'm not sure about Lemmy. I know that Lemmy does have bot accounts for other purposes, so I guess it's not impossible but I haven't heard of or seen one here.